2006 and the plutocracy

From ZNet:

Corporate concentration through global mergers and acquisitions reached a record at the close of 2006. In our daily life this means that companies are becoming ever fewer but also ever larger with greater power to impose their products and norms of consumption on us, dictate labour conditions (and unemployment) and exercise every kind of pressure on legislators, governments or international institutions so as to achieve the rules and legislation they consider necessary. What they cannot achieve through market mechanisms they can impose through laws favourable to them as has happened on many occasions in the year just past as well as previous ones.

Click here for the rest.

In other words, all my rantings about how our democracy is a theatrical sham, about how we actually are ruled by a plutocracy, are not only true, but getting worse. This is no filthy goddamned hippie rant. We vote, yes, but we vote for candidates from a menu of choices pre-approved by corporations and the wealthy elite. We have elected representatives, yes, but because the cost of campaigning is astronomically high, each and every one of them is greatly beholden to the corporations and wealthy elite who fund their campaigns--this affects Democrats and Republicans alike.

When I was a kid, there were a number of movies predicting that corporations would ultimately do exactly what they are doing now. That is, taking over. The great 1975 science fiction sports flick starring James Caan, Rollerball, envisions a future where we aren't citizens, but rather employees. There are no governments, only corporations who decide where we will live, who we will marry, what we will do with our lives. 1979's Alien shows a similarly bleak futuristic society. But the best articulated vision of the corporate dominated future comes from the decidedly non-scifi film, 1976's dark anti-television comedy Network.

Ned Beatty has a badass monologue:

There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!, Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? (pause) You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

Those are the nations of the world today. And it just keeps getting worse.



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